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DOCKS. WHARVES, & BOOM DAM OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA, ON THE 
CHARLES RIVER AT WATERTOWN, MASS. 




BOOM DAM ON COLD SPRING BROOK, OFPOSITE WATERTOWN. 



THE DISCOVERY 

OF THE 

ANCIENT CITY OF NGRUMBEGA. 

a Communication 

TO 

THE PRESIDENT AND COUNCIL OF THE AMERICAN 
GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY 

AT THEIR SPECIAL SESSION IN WATERTOWN, 
November 21, 1889. 



BY 

EBEN NORTON HORSFORD. 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK: 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. 

SE&e Etoerale JP«bb, CambriDge. 



SEnibrrsitg Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



0*| VI 



PREFACE. 



The demand for the communication regarding the site of the ancient 
city of Nortjmbega, made on the 21st of November last to the American 
Geographical Society at its special session in Watertown, has led me to 
anticipate, in some degree, the publication long promised of the results 
which the study of the interesting problem of the lost city and country 
has yielded. That paper is in press, but must wait for a time. Mean- 
while I have thought to attach a few of its illustrations to the story 
recently presented, and place the publication where it may be found by 
persons interested ; and further, to produce the paper, without the illus- 
trations, in a less expensive form. 

E. N. H. 

Cambridge, Jan. 1, 1890. 



THE DISCOYERY 



ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 



Judge Daly, President of the American Geographical Society : 

It is now nearly five years since I discovered on the banks of Charles 
River the site of Fort Norumbega, occupied for a time by the Bretons some 
four hundred years ago, and as many years earlier still built and occu- 
pied as the seat of extensive fisheries and a settlement by the Northmen. 
It is nearly as long since that discovery was the subject of a communica- 
tion which I had the honor to address to you, in your official capacity, on 
the first of March, 1885, which communication was published in the October 
Bulletin of the American Geographical Society of the same year. 

I have to-day the honor of announcing to you the discovery of Vinland, 
including the Landfall of Leif Erikson and the Site of his Houses. I have 
also to announce to you the discovery of the site of the ancient City of 
Norumbega. 

To perpetuate the date of these accessions to geography, a Tower has 
been set up at the site of Fort Norumbega, where I first found remains 
of the work of the Northmen. 

It had been proposed to accompany the unveiling of the Tablet on 
the Tower just completed with a summary account of the way by which 



g DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

I had been conducted to my later discovery, together with other exer- 
cises appropriate to the occasion, — including a Poem rehearsing the story 
of the Vinland Sagas, and music contributed by our Scandinavian friends 
and by a party of ladies from Norumbega Hall of Wellesley College, so 
called in honor of the discovery which was communicated to the public 
at about the time the corner-stone of the Hall was laid. But the lateness 
of the season has made the out-door gathering impracticable, and an 
invitation has been accepted to meet in this hall. 

As the Geographical Society has consented to give the occasion the 
honor of its official presence as at a special meeting convened to receive the 
announcement of the discoveries, I ask permission to lay before you copies 
of the maps, ancient and modern, charts, sketches, photographs, drawings, 
manuscripts, original plans and surveys, which I have gathered for the study 
of the problems of Vinland and Norumbega and for the purpose of illus- 
trating the detailed papers now in press, with the request that they be 
regarded as an earnest of the later presentation of the results of my work, 
in print, to the Society. 

I have to ask your further permission to present here and now a sum- 
mary of the course of my more recent investigation, which has resulted in 
the discovery of the site of the City of Norumbega. 



JUDGE DALY'S REPLY. 

Professor Horsford, — Allow me to say, on behalf of myself and 
colleagues, that it affords us great pleasure to congratulate you on your 
discovery. When you made your communication five years ago to the 
American Geographical Society, I was inclined to think that the facts 
then presented created a strong probability that the locality indicated 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 7 

by you was in the region where the Northmen settled in this country ; 
and the further and more extensive researches you have since made con- 
firm that conclusion. It is especially interesting at this period, when 
we are preparing to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the 
discovery of this continent by Columbus, that the facts you have ascer- 
tained should be brought to light in connection with this earlier discovery 
of America. We have hitherto but inadequately appreciated the North- 
men as a race, — their adventurous spirit, their capacity, and the degree of 
civilization to which they had attained in an age when Europe was but 
emerging from the darkness that had enveloped it for many centuries. 
Prof. A. H. Sayce, the learned Assyrian scholar, in a recent paper has 
declared, and given his reasons for, his belief that the primitive home 
of the Aryans — the central point of the departure or migration of that 
great civilizing race that at a very early period spread over the whole 
of Persia and India, and to the westward over the whole of Europe and 
America — was not, as has hitherto been supposed, the country lying on 
the slopes of the mountains of the Hindoo Kush, between the head-waters 
of the rivers Saxartes and the Oxus, but was some place in the south- 
eastern part of Scandinavia; which would make the Northmen the pro- 
genitors of the Greeks, the Romans, and, with the exception of one or 
two races, of all the nations of modern Europe ; which, if further re- 
searches should establish to be the fact, would make them the greatest 
race in the history of mankind. 

Du Chaillu, in his recent work on the Viking Age and the Ancestors 
of the English-speaking People, — a people now so widely distributed over 
the surface of the globe, — refers to those countries in the north of Europe 
from which the Northmen came as the birthplace of a new epoch in the 
history of mankind. All this is very interesting in connection with what 
is now generally admitted, — that America was discovered by the Northmen 



3 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

five centuries before the arrival of Columbus, and that for a considerable 
period thereafter they maintained a settlement upon our northeastern 
coast, and kept up during that time an intercourse with the mother 
country. 

It remains only in conclusion, Sir, that I should express my high 
appreciation of your labors and of the result that has followed them, and 
of your liberality in the lofty, characteristic, and imposing Tower that you 
have caused to be erected, to mark one of the places where the Northmen 
dwelt, and to commemorate these discoveries. 



STORY OF THE DISCOVERT OF NORUMBEGA. 



As we all know, there have been before the world for many scores of 
years, in some instances for as many centuries, certain grand geographical 
problems, challenging the spirit of research, the love of adventure, or the 
passion for discovery or conquest. They are such as these : Where was 
Atalantis ? Where was the Ultima Thule ? What is there at the North 
Pole ? Was there a Northwest Passage ? Where were the Seven Cities ? 
Where were the El Dorado of Raleigh, and the Landfalls of Leif Erik- 
son, of Columbus, of John Cabot, of Verrazano ? And where were 
Vinland and Norumbega ? 

The number of unsolved problems is steadily lessening. The last two 
mentioned are soon, with your consent, Mr. President, to be withdrawn from 
the column. I might, perhaps, say something concerning the other themes 
that have been named, which might interest you, and properly claim 
recognition at the outset of a story of geographical discovery. But you 
will, I am sure, prefer to anything else I might say here and to-day, a 
plain statement of the reasons for the faith that moved me to set up a Tower 
in Weston, at the junction of Stony Brook with the Charles. A wish that 
falls in so wholly with my sense of the requirements of the occasion leaves 
me no alternative. I will attempt to comply with it as best I may, 
asking your indulgence for the repetitions I cannot escape in telling the 
story of how I found the seat of the earliest European colony in the 
New World. 

Most who hear me will doubtless connect their first conception of 
Norumbega with the well-known poem of Whittier. You will not have 



20 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

forgotten how, as you read the poem, your sympathies went out to the 
Christian Knight, faint with his fruitless quest for a marvellous city of 
which he had heard, — a city of towers and spires and gilded domes, — 
and a fine people, rich in furs and pearls and precious stones ; nor how, 
as the pomp and splendor of a dying October day faded from his sight, and 
with it, in his rapt vision, the possible goal of his hopes, he exclaimed, 
almost in his latest breath, — 

" I fain would look, before I die, 
On Norumbega's walls." J 

I have recently received the following letter from Mr. Whittier : — 

Amesburt, Oct. 30, 1889. 

Dear Friend, — That adventurous Scandinavians visited New England 
and attempted a settlement here hundreds of years before Columbus, is no 
longer a matter of doubt. I had supposed that the famed city of Norum- 
bega was on the Penobscot, when I wrote my poem some years ago ; but I 
am glad to think of it as on the Charles, in our own Massachusetts. Thy 
discovery of traces of that early settlement at the mouth of Stony Brook and 
at Watertown is a matter of great archaeological interest, and the memorial 
Tower and Tablet may well emphasize the importance of that discovery. 

Regretting that I am unable to witness the unveiling of the Tablet, 
I am 

Very truly thy friend, John G. Whittier. 

You may have heard of Roberval, a French admiral, as the Lord of 
Norumbega ; or you may remember Milton's reference in " Paradise Lost " 
to the "icy blasts from the north of Norumbega;" or you may have 

1 The poem as published was preceded by a paragraph which read as follows : " Norumbega is 
the uame given by early French explorers to a fabulous country south of Cape Breton, first discovered 
by Verrazano in 1524. It was supposed to have a magnificent city of the same name on a great river, 
probably the Penobscot. The site of this barbaric city is laid down on a map published at Antwerp 
in 1570. In 1604 Champlain sailed in search of the northern Eldorado, twenty-two leagues up the 
Penobscot from the Isle Haute. He supposed the river to be that of Norumbega, but wisely came to 
the conclusion that those travellers who told of the great city had never seen it. He saw no evidences 
of anything like civilization, but mentions the finding of a cross, very old and mossy, in the woods." 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. H 

read of Norumbega, the "Lost City of New England," by the Eev. Dr. 
De Costa ; or you may recall that about four years ago there was some- 
thing in the local papers about the Landfall of John Cabot in 1497, and 
the site of Norumbega. 

Much of what I have recalled to you referred to the region not re- 
mote from our own. The old fort at the foot of the Tower concealed 
within its walls the entrance to the pathway that led to the desert's secret, 
which the Norman Knight sought for in vain. The secret was won only 
after protracted siege. It was a most fascinating bit of conquest ; it had 
the charm that gathers about the finding of long-lost treasure, something 
of the rapture that comes with the witnessed fulfilment of prophecy. 

The story of Norumbega was old, — very old for Massachusetts. Its 
antiquity may have furnished reason for believing the story to have had 
some foundation in truth. It had at least this : An Englishman had left a 
record of having seen a city bearing the name Norumbega, and the city 
was three quarters of a mile long. This man — David Ingram, a sailor — 
had been set on shore by Sir John Hawkins, in 1568, at Tampico, on the 
Gulf of Mexico, with some hundred and twenty others, in stress for lack 
of provisions. He had wandered all the way across the country, visiting 
many large Indian towns, and coming at length, in 1569, to the banks of 
Norumbega. He sailed in a French ship from the Harbor of St. Mary's 
(one of the earlier names of Boston Bay), a few hours distant from the 
Norumbega he visited, and ultimately got back to England, where he 
again met and was kindly received by Sir John Hawkins. He told a 
story that surpassed belief. He had seen monarchs borne on golden 
chairs, and houses with pillars of crystal and silver. He had visited the 
dwelling of an Indian chief, where he saw a quart of pearls ; and when 
his listeners murmured, he capped the relation with the statement that 
in one chief's house he had seen a peck of pearls. He was brought in 
audience before Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the kinsman of Sir Walter Raleigh. 
Thevet, who had been at Norumbega, on the banks of what he pronounced 
" one of the most beautiful rivers in all the world," and who had not 



12 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOEUMBEGA. 

improbably been at the mouth of Stony Brook, was present, and confirmed 
Ingram in part. Coronado's experiences in New Mexico, . 1540, enable us 
to confirm him in more ; and the brilliant researches of Mr. Cushing of 
Zuni memory and achievement, and the collections of Professor Putnam 
of the Peabocly Museum at Cambridge, enable us to comprehend most of 
the remainder of his relation. There were pearls; they were found in 
fresh-water clams (Unios). They are gathered by the peck at the West 
to-day ; the Peabody Museum has half a bushel of them taken from an 
Ohio mound by Professor Putnam. And there were furs. French mer- 
chants (I have it from the historian of New France) in one year burned 
two hundred thousand beaver skins to keep the price up. These furs came 
from the land of the Bretons, — from here. And there were precious 
stones, — turquoise and onyx and garnet : I have samples of them. And 
there were ornaments of copper and silver and gold : they are found in 
Ohio mounds to-day. The pillars of quartz crystal and columns of wood 
wrapped with thin sheets of silver and even of gold, I can credit, from 
what I have personally seen in some parts of Mexico. On festive occa- 
sions such sheets were displayed, so Mr. Cushing tells us, as flags are with 
us in honor of a day or of an event. Much of what Ingram related was 
what he had seen. Of some things related by him he had evidently only 
heard : the stories of the Incas of Peru and of the Montezumas of Mexico 
were among them. His hardships had brought confusion to his memory. 

Hakluyt wrote a book (carefully edited by the late Dr. Charles Deane, 
and published by the Maine Historical Society) to induce England to under- 
take the colonization of the country of Norumbega. Its discovery entered 
into some of the plans for penetrating the Northwest Passage. Sir Hum- 
phrey Gilbert lost his life in an expedition undertaken in part to find 
Norumbega. I have many ancient maps on which Norumbega as a coun- 
try is as prominent as New Spain or New France or Virginia, as well 
as many others having devices indicating a city against the name of 
Norumbega, subordinate to the name of Norumbega as a province. 

All these belong to the class of old recorded stories; most of them 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 13 

were in print before the landing of the Pilgrims. One could not help 
thinking that they must have some foundation in truth ; the alternative 
involved too many conspirators, of different nationalities. 

Champlain at the opening of the seventeenth century came, under 
Admiral De Monts, to our coast, and spent a good portion of three years 
exploring the bays and headlands and islands from Cape Cod to the Bay 
of Fundy, and studying the people and the products of the soil. The 
literature of geography was familiar to him. He tried to find Norumbega. 
He felt that somewhere there might be found the remains of a city. He 
went many leagues up the Penobscot from its mouth, but found nothing. 
He left the name on his map in the region where he sought for the city, 
about the mouth of the great river, but recorded his conviction that those 
who described it had not seen it. This learned and conscientious explorer 
justly commanded confidence wherever his publications were read. His 
readers felt his doubts. Lescarbot became merry over what he thought the 
delusion. Still, Capt. John Smith hoped to find the city or country ; and 
for a long time, down nearly to the end of the seventeenth century, the 
name of Norumbega appeared on Dutch maps. It appeared even on occa- 
sional maps of the eighteenth century. But at length it was to be found 
only in ancient history or geography, and in the name of a noble Hall 
set up by the public-spirited citizens of Bangor. 

Let us look a little further at the foundation of the old story ; we shall, 
after all, find it quite substantial. 

Verrazano, in 1524, came up to the angle of the Charles at Cambridge 
City Cemetery, near the remains of the then still standing Norman Villa, 
on Maiollo's map, which seems to have occupied the site of Leifs houses. 
He found and left us the name Norumbega in oranbega, — the initial JV 
accidentally obliterated from the map, and the m of the second syllable 
replaced by n, as given on his brother's map, — near the ancient St. John's 
Harbor, our modern Gloucester. Not far from Cape Ann, on the local 
map of Essex County of to-day, we have Norman's 0, uniformly called 
Norman's Woe, and also Norman's Cove, of palpable Norse derivation. 



14 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA 

Thus we have from an early date evidences that Northmen have been on 
our coast. 1 

A little later Parmentier, in 1539, found the name Norumbega applied 
to a land lying southwest-a-quarterwest from Cape Breton. Allefonsce 
under Eoberval, in 1543, determined the fact of there being two Cape 
Bretons (the source and the explanation of any number of mistakes in 
cartography), of which the more southern, referred to by Parmentier, was 
in the forty-third degree, and identical with Cape Ann. Within the limits 
of this forty-third degree was a river, at the mouth of which, according 
to Allefonsce, were many rocks and islands (Minot's Ledge, Cohasset rocks, 
the Lizard, the Roaring Bulls, the Graves, etc.), up which river, as Allefonsce 
estimated, fifteen leagues from the mouth, was a city which is called Norum- 
hegue. " TJiere was," he said, "a fine people" at the city ; "and they had 
furs of many animals, and wore mantles of marten skins." 

Allefonsce, a pilot by profession, has never been doubted. On him, 
more than on any one else, rest the identity of one of the Cape Bretons 
with Cape Ann, and the fact of there being a river, with a city on its 
banks, both bearing the name Norumbega, between Cape Ann and Cape 
Cod. I procured from the Bibliotheque Nationale a photographic copy of 
the original pen-made map, and of manuscripts of Allefonsce, that I might 
consult the original. There is no room whatever for question that a few 
leagues up a river having many rocks and islands at its mouth, in the forty- 
third degree, there was in 1543 a fine city called Norumbegue. In proof 
of this I might quote many authorities, if time permitted. 2 

Wytfliet, in 1597, in an augment to Ptolemy, says : " Norombega, a 
beautiful city, and a grand river are well known." He gives on his map 
a picture of a settlement, or villa, at the junction of two streams, one of 
which is the Rio Grande. Here, as we shall see later, was a great fishery, 
and of course dwellings and appurtenances to domestic life for persons 

1 We have other names of Norse derivation in Massachusetts ; as for example, Nanset, Naumkeag, 
Naumbeak, Namskaket, and Amoskeag. 

2 Among them are Ptolemy, Ramusio, Mercator, Lok, Maginn, Plancie, and Solis. 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 15 

engaged in the industry. I have framed into the Tower the stone mortar 
in use at the settlement. Wytfliet on his map had confounded the hum- 
bler settlement with the city. There had been some misapprehension. 

Thevet in his text places " Fort Norombegue " at the point where stands 
the Tower, and where Wytfliet placed the city, — at the junction of two 
streams ; and so the two together led me into temporary misapprehension. 
The fort was occupied in Thevet's time as a trading-post by the Breton 
French. To them was ascribed the construction of the fort. Thevet says 
further : " To the north of Virginia is Norumbega, which is well known as 
a beautiful city, and a great river ; still one cannot find whence its name 
is derived, for the natives call it Agguncia. 1 At the entrance of the river 
there is an island very convenient for the fishery." He describes the fort 
as surrounded by fresh water and at the junction of two streams. The 
City of Norumbega on his map was loiver down the river. 2 The French 
who occupied the fort called it Fort Norombegue. It was surrounded both 
by a ditch and a stockade. The ditch remains. 

It was largely what Allefonsce (1543) and Thevet (1556), who were on 
our coast as explorers, wrote, and what was pictured on Wytfliet's map, 
that led to my finding the fort. When I had deduced from the literature 
of geography that the fort was at the mouth of Stony Brook, I drove directly 
there, and found it on my first visit. 

But I early found, besides the fort, the evidences, long unintelligible to 
me, of a great industry (to which I have alluded), involving, among other 
things, graded areas some four acres in extent, paved with field bowlders. 
It was a most extraordinary display, to which I may refer later. 

As already remarked, after Champlain, — known, as he was, as a most 
competent explorer and conscientious man, whose itinerary was most full and 
clear and painstaking, and whose maps were without precedent for palpable 
evidences of care, — after Champlain and the publication of his unsuccessful 

1 Iroquois for "head," — which applies to a great rock in the margin of the pavement of the 
fisheries, and now at one end of the reservoir dam. 

2 The settlement at the junction of the two streams, and the site of the city lower down are given 
on the maps of both Thevet and Mercator 



IQ DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

exploration of the Penobscot, belief in the existence of the City of No- 
rumbega came to be generally less confident, and finally, as Dr. Palfrey's 
" History " shows, to be practically abandoned. 

To one modern writer more than to any other we are indebted for keep- 
ing the story of Norumbega alive. Rev. Dr. De Costa, at that time editor of 
the " American Magazine of History," wrote and published a few years ago 
the most fascinating story of the " Lost City of New England." He wrote 
and printed several papers, gathering together for preservation the scattered 
fragments of legends and history bearing on the subject. His conviction, 
however, like that of Champlain and all other personal explorers, except 
Allefonsce and Thevet, was that if the ruins of the city were ever to be 
anywhere found, they would be on the Penobscot, where our grand old 
Poet placed it. 

Yet every rood of the Penobscot to its extreme source has been scoured 
in the search, and no trace of the remains of a city has been found. There 
still exist on that noble river evidences of what the story grew from which 
was told to Champlain, — among them the name of Nolambeghe, preserved 
or known to the Indians of to-day (Vetromille), and the name Baya del 
Loreme on many ancient maps, as well as other names of Norse derivation 
on local maps of Maine ; but time will not permit us to pursue them. 

As the lost city was not on the Penobscot, and as it was not thought pos- 
sible that it could exist elsewhere, the search was at last given up. So 
Norumbega was lost. In view of the great interests involved, one might 
almost wish — say you ? — that it could have remained lost for a few 
years longer. 

In my judgment, however, if it were possible to-day to prove that the 
Phoenicians visited and long occupied parts of this country, or that this 
country was the Atalantis of Pliny and Solon, — either or both of them 
would dim, by the measure of the faintest Indian-summer haze only, the 
transcendent glory of the life-work of Columbus. 

But there was another country lost, — lost from a still earlier period. 
This was Vinland. Or it may perhaps more correctly be said that it is only 




RIVER FLOWING THROUGH A LAKE 
INTO THE SEA' 

VINLAND OP THE NORTHMEN 

Copied lIt 2 Hev I^Sll'Uctior} fey 

Geo. Davis, Civil Engineer. 




?IJE Of LEIf'5 ffoi/SE5. 



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5 




DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 17 

recently that it has been discovered and demonstrated that there had cer- 
tainly been a country hereabout to which the Northmen came, nine hundred 
years ago. 

Do you anticipate me by exclaiming that Vinland and Norumbega are 
identical ? 

But between such conclusion and the date of the earlier conviction of 
what might be found by research lay four years of almost constant study 
and personal exploration, with the co-operation of the engineer and 
draughtsman and photographer at almost every step. I only felt that I 
saw the end almost from the beginning, and lodged a caveat four years ago 
in connection with the Norse name of Cape Cod, — Kjalarnes, — and waited. 
I repeated my conviction more than once in my address at the unveiling of 
the statue to Leif in Boston two years ago. And if I tell you now that 
I have found the ancient city of Norumbega, as well as the fort and the river 
and the country of Norumbega, and learned somewhat of their marvellous 
history, — it will, I hope, help to give you courage to bear with me in the 
unfolding of a relation which I cannot much shorten, much less omit. 

Let me tell you of a little prediction that I made at a certain early stage 
of my research, which, if my reasoning from data discovered were correct, 
must be realized, and which may help to give you patience as well as cour- 
age. It was the test of the trustworthiness of my method of research. I 
said to myself and to my household : " If I am correct, every tributary 
to the Charles will be found to have, or to have had, a dam and a pond, 
or their equivalent, at or near its mouth or along its course." That was 
my prophecy. One may study its fulfilment on either side of the river 
from its mouth to its source, at one's leisure. It was long after this pre- 
diction that I found its verification at every point I examined, even as far 
as fifty miles from its mouth along the Charles, in Millis ; and, farther still, 
in Holliston. The reasoning that led up to necessary dams and ponds at 
or near the mouths of the tributaries led with like force to a great dam on 
the Charles itself; and that is also open to your study. 

On the Tablet of the Tower one may read that Norumbega was the name 



18 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

of a fort at the base of the Tower, of the river flowing past us, of a city 
on its banks, and of a country that reaches from Long Island Sound to the 
St. Lawrence ; and that unmistakable remains of the people who occupied 
the country are strewn throughout this vast region. And to be still more 
specific, I may say there is not a square mile of the basin of the Charles 
that does not contain incontestable memorials of these people, that will pres- 
ently be as obvious to others as they now are to me. 

Shall I tell you at the outset why this has not been known before ? It 
was a secret that, among other things, lay hidden in the signification of two 
or three Algonquin roots. 

You are all familiar with the fact that the organs of speech of different 
peoples differ more or less. The German has difficulty with our pronuncia- 
tion, and we with the German ; the Hawaiian language, like the Italian, is 
marked by the frequent recurrence of vowels ; some persons lisp ; m and 
n are sometimes confounded with each other, as b and p are, and, as the 
Chinese illustrate to us, I and r ; so too b and v, u and w, are interchange- 
able. 1 The early settlers said Marvill Head where we say Marble Head. 2 
The Dutch have difficulty with the English u, v, and w. 

Long ago — he has been dead a hundred years — a Moravian mission- 
ary, Zeisberger, a German, came to this country, and noted a peculiarity in 
Algonquin speech. Heckewelder, another German, remarked the same 
thing. Du Ponceau, a Frenchman, observed it. This peculiarity was that 
the Indians of the tribes of the Algonquin family, which prevailed through- 
out New England, could not, — I beg you specially to remark it,— could 
not utter the sound of b without prefixing to it the sound of m; so that 
in uttering bi, the word that means "water," the Indians said mhi, — just 
as the Latins, possibly preserving the same root mhi (autochthonous of 
old), said imbibo, " to imbibe or drink ; " just as the Greek sailors who 
come to our capital city speak of coming to mBoston ; just as in Central 

1 Roger Williams noticed among the tribes of Indians, even in places within forty miles square of 
area, that I, n, and r were dialectic equivalents in the Indian name of " dog." 

2 See Wood's New England's Prospect. 



DISCOVERY OP THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 19 

and South America and in great portions of Africa one may find to-day 
in names of persons and places b preceded by m. (See Stanley's names, 
and Du Chaillu's and Brinton's, and names in missionary records.) 

Many hundred years ago the country we call Norway was called Nor- 
begia 1 and Norbega, 2 which are the same philologically — as we have just 
seen — as Noruega, or Norvega, or Norwega ; the b is the equivalent of u, 
or v, or to. 

The people of Norway settling in a newly discovered country claimed 
the sovereignty of that country. Vinland belonged to Norway, — that 
is, Norbega. But the Indians among whom the Norwegians came, could 
not, as we have seen, utter the sound of I without putting the sound of m 
before it. They could not readily say Noriega, but said, because it was 
easier of utterance, Normlega. This was the name later given by the 
natives wherever along the coast, from Cape Cod to the St. Lawrence, 
explorers asked the name of the country occupied by the Norwegians. 
In answer to such questions the natives gave the name that had so long 
before been conferred, — Normlega. This name seems to have been used in 
the sense of " belonging to Norway." Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, 
Dutch, and English navigators coming to our shores spelled the name Normlega 
variously. So we had Norumlega; we had the u in it replaced by 0, a, e, 
and i; and we had lega replaced by begue and lee and laga, etc. Champlain 
left the name of the country about the Penobscot Naranlergue. On one 
map only have I found Neremlega. On three maps, obviously copies of 
a common original, I have found at the same point, respectively, Norvega, 
Noruega, and Norumlega? These three names on the separate maps were 
all alike in Nova Francia (New France). 

Now, in 1524, after the Northmen in the basin of the Charles had moved 
northward, pursuing their industries along the coast, some naturally becom- 
ing merged in the Indian people, Verrazano, the Italian explorer under 

1 See Bordone. 2 See Maginn. 

8 Norvega was Norbega, as Sevastopol was Sebastopol, or as Ribero was Rivero ; and Norbega 
became Nor'mbega, as Boston becomes 'mBoston. Grotius and Forster recognized the possible 
identity of Norwega with Norumbega. 



20 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

Francis I. and Madame the Regent of France, came here and saw traces of 
the former presence of the Northmen. There is recorded on his maps 
(Maiollo's and that of his brother Hieronymus Verrazano) Norman's Villa, 1 
and Anorobagea, and Oranbega. 2 Allefonsce's visit was later, in 1543 ; and he 
found the city and river of Norombegue in the forty-third degree. Thevet 
came later still, and found in the same degree — possibly, it may be suggested, 
in part by relation of others — the river and city, and also the fort, of No- 
rumbega. These navigators and discoverers were all Frenchmen. 3 Breton 
French traders occupied the fort when Thevet was in this neighborhood. 
This portion of Massachusetts had been called Francesca and Gallia by Ver- 
razano, and Terra de la Franciscane by Allefonsce. This was the earliest New 
France, — Nova Francia, — the name which Jacques Cartier in 1534-1535 
extended over the shores of the St. Lawrence, the story of which we have 
in the works of Dr. Parkman. The Dauphin map (1542-1543) confounded, as 
Sebastian Cabot's of 1544 did, the southern with the northern Cape Breton, 
or rather fused the two in one. It was Allefonsce, the pilot of Eoberval, 
who in 1543 left, in the manuscript to which I have referred, the record 
of his discovery that there were two Cape Bretons. It is this original manu- 
script — of which I have with its pen-made maps the absolute copy — that 
has determined the site of the treasures of the forty-third degree. 

This Allefonsce manuscript determined our Cape Ann to he the southern Cape 
Breton. It determined the river Charles to be the Norumbega. That is, the 
river Norumbega was in the forty- third degree ; it was a tidal river (Ver- 
razano and Thorfmn). " It is at its mouth full of islands which stretch out 
ten or twelve leagues to the sea." 4 Of such a tidal river there is but one in 
the forty-third degree. 

1 Norman Villa is also on the Ulpius Globe in the same latitude. 

2 Norman's Woe occupies the site of, or is near to, the Oranbega of Verrazano. Not far away 
was the dialectic equivalent Naambeak of John Smith, and its near fellow of Naumkeag, in use to-day, 
and Namskaket and Amoskeag, already mentioned ; of close kinship, and in another direction, were 
Bogasto and Jar. Verrazano records the lunga villa — such were the houses of the Northmen — 
and the sweathouse, or sto, as it is preserved in Boga-sto, in the town of Millis. 

8 Verrazano was an Italian in the employ of the French Government. 

4 Allefonsce's mouth of the Charles had for its two promontories Cape Ann and Cape Cod. He 
estimates its width at " above forty leagues." 



3 

g CD 
O Ixj 





DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OP NORUMBEGA. 21 

On the maps of which I spoke, where, at the same point and given as the 
alternative names of this city, Norumbega, Norvega, and Noruega are found, 
and where Norvega as a province occurs, there is also, and in the same pre- 
cise latitude, the Norumbega River. This was the Rio Grande of the Portu- 
guese, the Anguileme of Verrazano, the Mishaum (Big Eel) of the Massachu- 
setts Indians, and the Charles of Capt. John Smith. Over all, in larger print, 
on these maps, is the historic name of 

Nova Feancia. 

Of this New France Mr. Bancroft, our great historian, says : " The French 

DIPLOMATS NEVER FAILED TO REMEMBER THAT BOSTON WAS WITHIN THE 
LIMITS OF THE ORIGINAL New FRANCE." 

Here was the original New France. 

If Boston was in New France ; and if the river Norumbega (the Charles), 
and the city of Norumbega and the fort of Norumbega, on the banks of the 
Charles, were all in New France as well as in the country of Norumbeo-a, 
and in the forty-third degree, — then we cannot be in doubt as to where 
the Northmen came nine hundred years ago. As I have demonstrated else- 
where that Leif's houses were farther down the Charles, we cannot doubt 
that the Vinland of Leif was near the city of the Norumbega of history, 
tradition, and song. So eastern Massachusetts held both Vinland and the 
ancient city and seaport and river and fort of Norumbega. 

It is, as the French tell us, the unexpected that happens. I found my 
guide to the city in a single paragraph in one of the Sagas of Thorfinn 
Karlsefni, which appears, by an oversight of the scribe or copyist possibly, 
attached to the story of Freydis. Let me give the substance of it. 

Leif had built houses near Gerry's Landing, and called the country Vin- 
land, and returned to Greenland. Thorwald had come to Leif's houses, had 
explored the Charles, had found in it many shallows and islands, and a corn- 
shed on an island far to the west ; had consumed a summer in his discoveries, 
and returned to Leif's houses in the autumn. In attempting exploration at 
sea he had been wrecked on Cape Cod, had repaired his ship and set up the 



9 H 

p f 

1 1 

to g. 

I f 






& 



22 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

old keel in the sand, and called the cape Kjalarnes (Keel cape) ; he had been 
killed in battle with the Indians, and buried on the Gurnet. His crew had 
returned to Greenland to be succeeded by Thorfinn, who remained three 
years in Vinland, and because of Indian distrust and opposition gave up the 
attempt to settle the country. 

Thorfinn in his richly laden ship had returned with his wife Gudrid and 
his little boy Snorri to Greenland and to Norway ; had passed the winter in 
the society of the Court at Nidaros, the residence of the king, not far from 
the modern Thronheim. As he was ready to take his departure for Iceland, 
his future home, waiting at the wharf for a favoring wind, there came to 
the ship a Bremen merchant who wished to buy his husa-snotra. Thorfinn 
did not care to part with it. " I will not sell," said he. " I offer you a pound 
of gold [Beamish says, a half-mark of gold}," said the Southerner. " Karl- 
sefni [Thorfinn Karlsefni] thought this a good offer, and closed the bargain. 
The German then went away with the husa-snotra. But Karlsefni knew not 
what wood was in it ! It was mb'surr from Vinland ! " 

Beamish estimated a half-mark of gold at £16 sterling, or about $80 of 
our money (and much more, expressed by modern values of service or pro- 
ducts of labor). What a sum for an article of household use, the chief value 
of which was in its wood ! What could mb'surr wood be ? And what was a 
husa-snotra ? 

About the latter there has been endless speculation. Husa obviously was 
related to house ; but what did snotra mean ? One writer thought it a 
besom ; another, a broom-handle ; another, a bar to fasten the door from 
within. It might be a weathercock, a crown, a piece of decorative carving 
in wood. None were satisfactory. Professor Vigfusson — the late Icelandic 
Professor at Oxford — came to the conviction that it was an ancient Fin- 
nish word, now obsolete. 

The " Antiquitates Americanae " had been translated into Danish and 
Latin by Rafn, and most Vinland students had seen the Vinland Sagas either 
in the original or in one or the other of these two translations. I had not met 
a reference, in connection with the discussion of husa-snotra, to the summary 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 23 

of the Vinland Sagas in Peringskjold's translation of the Heiraskringla of 
Snorro Sturleson into Swedish and Latin. Might there not be another ren- 
dering in Swedish ? I learned of a copy of the first edition of Peringskjold's 
Heimskringla of 1697 in Stockholm, and was fortunately able to obtain it. 
In this, husa-snotra was translated ivag in Swedish ; into Latin by statera, or 
statera lignea, " wooden scales " (scale-pans). The husa-snotra had possibly 
(probably) been wrought, or repaired (at least the scale-pans), by a sailor on 
his home voyage from Vinland, and presented to Thorfinn. It was a pair of 
house-scales, the scale-pans of which were of m'dsurr wood} The husa-snotra 
was the equivalent of the house steelyard for weighing. 

Here is the significant sentence in the Saga : — 

" Thorfinn had wood felled and hewn and brought to the ship, and the wood 
piled on the cliff to dry." (See Cabot's translation.) 

Let us study it. 

It -was felled. It was part of a grown tree. 

It was hewn, to remove useless weight. 2 

It was piled on the cliff to dry. Why ? Because it was wet. It had heen in 
the water. It had been cast into the river, or a tributary to it, above the ship. 

It had been floated to the ship. It had been fished out and carried to the 
cliff by hand. 

It was in blocks that men could carry. 

It had been piled so as to be convenient for sliding to the ship, at 
the base of the bluff, wben ready to receive its cargo. 

In these terms of analysis I found what led to the discovery of the 
desert's secret, — the ancient City of Norumbega. I saw — afar off, to be 
sure — what the Norman Knight almost saw in a mirage among the gor- 
geous clouds that sometimes gather about the setting sun. 

My study was at last rewarded. I had delved to the heart of the 

1 Scale-pans of bronze are found in Sweden, of the bronze age. (Montelius, p. 114.) 

2 Leif also " hewed the cargo of wood for his vessel." 



24 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NOKUMBEGA. 

problem. As I look back upon tbe experience, I tbink it may not bave 
been altogether a playful fiction that I uttered to myself, when glancino- 
down the vista before me I said, " I have not only reached the heart 
of the problem, but I can feel its beat." 

Mosur wood, as I will presently explain to you, was the burrs or large 
warts that occasionally grow on certain trees, more frequently found in 
primitive forests, — as oak (one variety is called burr oak), birch, hickory, 
maple, ash. (Mosur wood = Knorrige Ausiouchs, Old German.) 

I have already said that there were monuments of the presence of 
the Northmen on every square mile of the basin of the Charles. I find 
I must at once tell you what these monuments are. 

"We have no account of transportation by the Northmen except by water. 
The mosur wood gathered by Thorfinn, we have just seen, was floated to the 
ship, which lay in tbe Charles, and then taken from the water to be piled on 
a cliff, a Muff, a bank, out of the reach of high tide, to dry. "We will assume 
what I cannot stop now to dwell on, — I have discussed it elsewhere at 
length, — that the spot where this occurred in Thorfinn's experience was 
at or near Gerry's Landing, just above the ancient bluff known as Symond's 
Hill, by the river (the site of Leif's houses), near the City Hospital. That 
was tbe spot where a great industry in Vinland began. The mosur blocks 
were felled and hewn at first along the neighboring bluffs on the Charles. 
At the base of these bluffs are still ditches, or canals, into which the blocks 
may bave been rolled, and along which, after the ditches were filled with 
the water at high tide, the blocks were floated down to where the ship 
lay. The ship was the gathering-place. The blocks had been " brought to 
the ship." They were not taken on board immediately; but removed from 
the water, and carried by hand and piled on a cliff to dry. When the imme- 
diate shores of the river had been exhausted of the mosur wood, the shores 
of the tributaries flowing into the river became the field of activity, and the 
mosur blocks were sent floating down the streams ; and where the streams 
were remote from the bases of the slopes on either side, and sources of water 
were at hand, canals, or nearly level troughs, were dug to transport the 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 25 

blocks to the streams, and ultimately to the Charles. We now see why 
dams and ponds were necessary at the mouths of the streams, to prevent 
the blocks from going down the Charles without a convoy, and out to sea 
to be lost. Consider as an example the pond at the mouth of the Cold- 
spring Brook opposite Watertown. I call its artificial wall below a boom- 
dam. It is a good example. There is another striking one just below 
Newton Upper Falls, on the left bank, through the ridge. The volume 
of water of the stream spread out against the dam would become, on the 
brow, too shallow for the blocks to pass over. They would thus be saved 
as logs are, by a boom across a stream down which they are floating. 

There is an admirable canal, walled on one side for a thousand feet, along 
the west bank of Stony Brook, in the woods above the Fitchburg Railroad 
Crossing between Waltham and Weston. The Cheesecake Brook is another, 
and Coldspring Brook another. There is an interesting dry canal near Mur- 
ray Street, not far from Newtonville. It may be seen from the railway-cars 
on the right, a little to the east of Eddy Street, approaching Boston. These 
are among the monuments. The forts — dwelling-places surrounded by 
water, and in their day also by stockades — gave examples of ditches such 
as we have surrounding the ancient fort, near the Tower. 

The canals, ditches, deltas, boom-dams, ponds, fish-ways, forts, dwellings, 
walls, terraces of theatre and amphitheatre, scattered throughout the basin 
of the Charles, are the monuments I had in mind when I said there was not 
a square mile draining into the river that lacked an incontestable monument 
of the presence of the Northmen. 

To make clearer our conception of the picture I am trying to present, 
let us follow an individual block of mosur wood. 

I have spoken of the canals at the base of the hillsides along the tribu- 
taries to the Charles. The block of mosur wood we will follow shall be the 
burr, or wart, growing on an oak near the top of the slope along Stony 
Brook, a quarter of a mile above the Fitchburg Crossing between Waltham 
and Weston. The tree on which the burr grows is felled by the axe, and the 
trunk above and below the burr cut off. The wood of the trunk portion 



26 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

of the block is hewn away, to reduce its weight and size. The block, so 
shorn and shaped, is rolled down the hill till it reaches the canal, where it 
floats with other blocks, rolled down by other choppers, in a sluggish current, 
to be discharged at the outlet into Stony Brook, or on a delta as at the end 
of the ditch near the Tower, which is on a little ridge projecting into the 
bay, or beg a (literally a norumbega). 1 

The discharge on the delta permitted assortment before making up the 
rafts that were to descend the Charles. This detention would enable each 
chopper, at intervals, to select and mark the fruit of his labor, or each 
contractor to gather and identify the results of the work of his several 
axemen. There were evidences, before the reservoir was established, of 
boom-dams and ponds on Stony Brook at various points above, which might 
have been used for marking or assorting and rafting the burrs. Once in the 
Charles, the rafts would descend to the required great boom-dam at the sea 
port of Norumbega, wherever that might be. 

Do some think that I have given undeserved dignity to the ditches in 
calling them canals ? They are so named in the old deeds in Weston. If 
you look at them on the left of the highway between Sibley's and Weston, 
with the stone walls on either side, you will not wonder that the word 
"canal" as well as "ditch" should have suggested itself. They are so 
called on the published town maps of Millis and Holliston, many miles 
above us. 

Now let us return to the sentences in the Saga of Thorfmn that have 
held such vast secrets. 

It was, we remember, a single article of domestic use, in part composed 
of wood, which was paid for with £16 sterling (Beamish), — a sum which in 
modern equivalents of labor would be several times greater ! It must have 
been something valued by the travelling Bremen merchant, not because 
of its association with Thorfinn, but for something else, to a merchant, of 

1 The Norse and Algonquin have common elements. I was at first surprised and then delighted 
with this coincidence. It points to deeper truth. The roots no and bih and the utterance ug are com- 
mon to Norse and Algonquin, and many other languages, classic and aboriginal. But this will be 
discussed at length elsewhere. 




;i3§Ss£i§s£^ ! 



STONE WALL AND CANAL OR DITCH NEAR NORSE DAM. 




STONE WALL AND CANAL NEAR THE NORSE DAM AND SIBLEY'S STATION. 
FITCHBURG R- R. 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 27 

vastly greater moment. Let us assume for the occasion, what we shall 
presently find fully sustained, that it was because it suggested the basis 
of an industrial adventure. What then was it that gave value to the mosurr 
loood ? 

In the last canto of " The Lord of the Isles " occurs the couplet (it is 
King James who speaks at the banquet), — 

" ' Bring here,' he said, ' the masers four 
My noble fathers loved of yore.' " 

A reference to the appendix of the edition of Scott edited by Lockhart 
reveals that these "masers" were wooden drinking-cups — flagons, beakers — 
mounted in silver, and kept by King Robert the Bruce as heirlooms in 
an iron chest, with other bric-a-brac, gold and silver ornaments, and the 
royal treasure. 

Maser wood was employed in the manufacture of communion cups for 
church service, — chalices, — and is mentioned in inventories of ancient 
cathedrals. It is also mentioned by Spenser, — 

" A mighty mazer bowl of wine was set." 

And here is a line from Ben Jonson, — 

" Their brimful mazers to the feasting bring." 

On going back to the root of the word, it proves to be the same as 
that of mass, and originated in the process by which wheaten flour and 
water could, with kneading, be made to increase in size and become a 
mass. (Skeat.) The moistened gluten became adhesive ; more flour would 
cling ; and so, by alternate additions of water and flour and kneading, the 
dough would increase in volume. From this came the name masa, which the 
Spanish give to the dough of corn meal, — a word in use in Mexico to-day, 
and the source of the specific botanical name of Indian corn in Zea mais. 
The word in St. Domingo is mahis. The early Pilgrims heard of it as Indian 
maisum. The kneading gave to the flour and water mixed a fibrous, interla- 



28 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

ring texture, which bound the whole together. This was the mass, which gave 
its name to the Sacrament in which it served. Maser wood possessed this 
texture. Maser, or mazur, or masur wood is defined, in Old High German, as 
"warty outgrowth from trees," — we call them burrs, or borls. It could be 
wrought into thin forms, and would not readily crack or split. The Swedes 
had scale-pans for weighing made of this wood, thin and light, and also plates 
and trenchers and kneading-troughs and bowls and goblets. Maser wood 
is still used in this country to make mortars for grinding pepper, cinnamon, 
and the like in domestic service; also for kneading-troughs. There was 
a factory for wooden mortars and other products of the turning-lathe on 
Chester Brook, — Mead's. This wood may have been used more or less in 
the Old World in place of the costly bronze and perishable glass and 
earthenware, — great wants of civilization. In ancient and very early 
times it was used for war-clubs. A small growth of stem surrounded by 
a ring of the maser growth was easily converted into a war-club, — the 
club of Hercules. (Larousse.) It became the symbol of command carried 
by the leader, and was the foundation of a usage, or fashion, that pre- 
vails to this day, and preserves the use of the word in the mace, borne 
before the Speaker of the House of Commons as well as of the American 
Congress, — before the Lord Mayor, the Lord Chancellor, and so on. We 
see traces of this word in the maze of the dance and the maze of a laby- 
rinth ; in mazurka, the Polish dance ; in macerate, a process of kneading (see 
also master and measure). 

Now, maser wood was tough, lasting, decorative ; did not grow every- 
where and on all trees ; was sought for, and paid for generously, by the 
Church, the aristocracy, the municipality, the government, and for domes- 
tic uses. It had already naturally become relatively scarce in Europe. 
It was a form of wood-growth that pointed possibly to the old age of 
the forest. 1 A virgin supply would be a prize to be laid before enter- 

1 Here may have been the seed of expansion into a great industry, and a commerce with the New 
World conducted primarily and chiefly by or through the Northmen. We catch glimpses of its spread, 
possibly, in the ancient Brazil {He Arbres, island of woods), in baccalaos carried across the seas by 
the Basques, and in chance arrivals at other points in Europe. The Massachusetts Indians conceived 





BURRS ON OAK TREES ON THE LINE OF DITCH LEADING TO THORFINN'S LANDING. 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 29 

prising merchants, wood- dealers, and decorators of houses and furniture. 
Leif and Freydis knew of its value, as also Thorfinn, and it was 
their principal cargo on leaving Vinland. The Bremen merchant was con- 
versant with the wants of civilization and the methods of enterprise. 
Thorfinn did not notice, or take account of, the maser scale-pans of the 
husa-snotra from the point of view of the enterprising Southern man. He 
knew that the wood could be wrought into thin forms without liability to crack 
or warp, and appreciated the significance of a new source. 

At first the maser wood could be gathered near the settlement, as 
we have seen ; but the supply would soon be exhausted. The choppers 
must go farther. There were no horses, no roads. The obvious method 
of transportation was by water, — at first from the immediate wooded 
shores of the Charles, then from the shores of its tributaries, and then 
along artificial canals, conducting to these tributaries and the river. But 
to prevent the blocks from going out to sea, there must be dams at the 
mouths of the tributaries to arrest them. I had found many canals lead- 
ing to tributaries and to the Charles, when I reflected that if I had 
rightly divined the office of these canals, there must be at the mouth of 
each tributary, or along the stream near and above it, a dam and pond, 
or the remains of them or their equivalents, wherever the industry of 
the maser wood was prosecuted by the Northmen. I have traced these 
dams up the Charles nearly to its extreme source. I have followed them 
on the Neponset and the Piscataqua, and on the tributaries to the Merrimac. 
Not only the boom-dams at or near the mouths of the streams falling into 
the Charles, but the canals all over Newton and Weston, in Belmont and 
Watertown, and Woburn and Arlington and Medford and Cambridge, in 
Dedham and Millis and Holliston and elsewhere, are frequently walled 

the early English colonists could have come only for wood. But even in Thorfinn's time, in the ac- 
count of Freydis, it is related that "the expedition to Vinland was commonly esteemed to be both 
lucrative and honorable." Her vessels, as we have seen, brought home wood from Vinland. Leif 
owed his added name — " the Lucky " — to having had the good fortune to save the crew of a wrecked 
ship loaded with wood on its way to Greenland. The importation of certain kinds of wood from the 
region of Vinland was already an established industry. Gudrid told the Pope at Rome of the Chris- 
tian settlements by Scandinavians, already in her time, in Vinland. See also Adam von Bremen. 



30 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

with stone, as in the case of the Cheesecake and Coldspring, where the 
Boston and Albany Railroad crosses below Newtonville, and near the Catholic 
Theological Seminary in Brighton, and the stream crossing the highway 
between Sibley's and "Weston. Undoubtedly the walls have been repaired 
in modern times, and in some cases it will be difficult to distinguish be- 
tween ancient canals and modern ditches for drainage. Some of the dams 
are very massive. In some cases the ponds have more or less been filled 
with alluvial deposit, and now constitute meadow-land, or a swamp, as at 
the mouth of the Cheesecake. In others a modern dam below has sub- 
merged the mouth of the stream, — in which cases the outline of the dam 
is sometimes betrayed in the growth of shrubbery. In a few cases a 
canal ends in a delta, — as on Eddy Street in Newton, near the fish-traps 
on the Cheesecake, and at the end of the canal near the Tower. In 
many cases the dam is accompanied by a fish-way, — as on the stream from 
Lexington to the Mystic, and on Mother Brook. 

Along these canals and tributaries are artificial islands that once gave 
sites and protection to Norse homes, — as you may see near the railroad 
station at West Newton on the street toward the Lower Falls, and near 
Burroughs Pond. One is still indicated in the grounds of Hon. Chauncy 
Smith in Cambridge, in the broad mound around which a canal formerly 
conducted water from the slopes beyond Craigie Street. The original 
path of the modern Brattle Street crossed on the boom-dam below the 
pond into which the canal led, and which has only recently been filled. 
The dwellings had the additional protection of stockades, like the old 
fort near the Tower, occupied after the Northmen by the Breton French 
as a trading-post, as remarked by Thevet. 

All these boom-dams at the entrance to the Charles point to a larger 
boom-dam across the Charles, where the total harvest of blocks from all 
the basins might be drawn from the water and piled to dry. That must 
have been near the place where they were shipped. 

Do you ask now, Where did these blocks find place for shipment? 
When I answer that, I shall have turned aside the screen which has 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OP NORUMBEGA. 31 

so long baffled the students of New England cartography, and shown you 
the site of the ancient Norumbega. 

Go with me down the Charles from the Tower past Islington and Lily 
Point Grove, and the great Watch Factory of Waltham, and the boom- 
dam at the mouth of Beaver Brook, now a pond filled with deposit from 
the brook, past the swamp at the mouth of the Cheesecake, past 
Bemis's Station, past the terraced hillside on the right, which is entitled 
to more study than I have been able to give to it, and at length we 
shall come to a stone dam over which the sweet water of the river pours 
to-day. This dam is made of field bowlders such as compose the beau- 
tiful new churches in "Weston, Watertown, and Wellesley, — not square- 
cornered stones, or split or hewn, or the product of drilling in the quarry 
and blasting, but like the larger stones of the Tower, adjusted to their 
most stable positions. It is at the head of tide-water. Within the memory 
of living men, once only has the incoming tide risen above the crest of 
the dam. It was when the easterly storm and tide and wind swept 
away the Minot's Ledge Light. With that single exception, — so I have 
been told, — the dam has been the dividing line between fresh water 
and salt at high tide. 

Has it ever occurred to any one to ask how long that dam has been 
there ? The Watertown Historical Society has just come into being, or it 
would not have been left till to-day to demand an answer to this question. 

The earliest man of Winthrop's colony to ascend the Charles was 
Roger Clapp (1630). His story is a part of the history of Watertown. 
Let me repeat it to you. He describes the narrow, shallow rapids below, 1 
which he reached, as he estimated, three leagues from the mouth of the 
river. His party found in the neighborhood an encampment of Indians, 
some three hundred by estimate, at the head of tide-water, where some 
of them were taking fish in the shallows above the tide-water. 

1 The shallows — rapids at ebb-tide — prevented the explorers (Champlain perhaps among them) 
from ascending the Charles to the site of Norumbega. Heylin and others ascribe to the falls on the 
American rivers the failure more thoroughly to explore the interior. Had the explorers gone up at 
flood-tide, it might not have been left to our time to find Norumbega. 



32 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

Clapp observed the shallows at the head of tide-water at Watertown, 
and also shared the product of the devices used by the Indians for fishing 
purposes just below, which involved the descent and fall of the stream 
as early as 1630. Wood, who came to the country the year before Clapp, 
and left in August, 1633, and whose book ("New England's Prospect") 
bears date of 1634, wrote of the fall of fresh waters and the fishing at 
a weir below. 

This fall and the fishing were mentioned by Josselyn in 1638. Later 
still, Dun ton wrote of a " great fall of fresh waters which conveigh them- 
selves into the ocean through the Charles River." 

The weir fishing was continued by the whites, and the profit in later 
times divided between Watertown and Brighton down to 1860 ; 1 and 
I had the honor a few months ago to converse at length with the 
latest custodian of this industry, the present Town Clerk of Watertown, 
Mr. Ingram, who pointed out to me the theatre of the industry with 
the weir. He conducted me also to the oldest map of Watertown, in 
the Secretary of State's office in Boston ; and on that I found traced the 
canal through which flowed the waters that turned the first wheel of the 
first flouring-mill in New England. 

Let us look a little further. There may be some among us who have 
not heard of Roger Clapp, the first of the Puritans to reach the head of 
tide-water on the Charles ; or possibly of Wood or Josselyn or Dunton, 
who wrote of the spot a few years later. But there is one of whom 
every son and daughter of New England has heard, John Winthrop, — 
the great leader of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. He was the an- 
cestor of the venerable scholar, statesman, orator, public servant, who — 

" In an old age serene and bright 
And lovely as a Lapland night," — 

is the living object of our reverent and grateful homage. John Winthrop 
records an incident in the history of the Colony that relates to the age 
of the dam at Watertown. 

1 See Nelson's History of Waltham. 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 33 

On the very spot where, according to popular belief, 1 the first 
flouring-mill in New England — possibly in America — was set up, now 
stands its efficient successor (more than one generation of mills between), 
still in active service, depending for its water-power upon the same differ- 
ence of level between the water above the dam and below the mill, of 
which advantage was taken by the early colonists. The ancient mill was 
driven by an undershot wheel, as was the modern one, till the turbine 
came, the water passing under instead of over the wheel. It happened 
on one occasion that a little child fell into the raceway above the mill. 
Before the eyes, but beyond the rescue of the miller, the child floated into 
the flume above the wheel. An accident had removed one of the blades 
of the wheel. As Winthrop relates, a special Providence directed that the 
current should bring the child exactly into the place of the lost blade of 
the water-wheel, — "for otherwise," he says, "if an eel pass through, it is 
cut asunder," — so that when the miller reached the outlet of the flume, 
he found the child absolutely unharmed, sitting waist-deep in the water 
below. And now, so long as the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony 
shall be read, so long will the story of the wonderful deliverance 
of the little child be remembered as an incident of the early life of 
Watertown. 

The significance of the event to us is that it preserves the testimony 
of Winthrop as to the age of the dam above. The water-power was 
gained by the dam. It was a fall of only four and a half feet, as Mr. 
Magee, the present proprietor, informs me ; and this involved a canal or 
raceway of nearly a quarter of a mile in length along the gentle descent 
of the Charles. 

Who built the dam ? It was made of natural, rounded, massive field- 
bowlders. English pioneers, economical of time and men, in a region of 
virgin forests build dams of wood cut along the banks above and floated 
down, not of scattered bowlders gathered over great areas from the sur- 

1 The mill-stones were brought from England, and are mentioned in the cost of equipment for 
the colony. 



34 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

face of the soil. All history is silent. Dudley, who later had a lawsuit 
about the ownership of the mill, is silent. Winthrop himself is silent. 
Could the thoughtful pen that recorded the discovery of Adam's chair, 
since lost, and again and recently found ; recorded the fight between 
the mouse and the snake, witnessed with such natural interest by the 
Puritans who formed a ring around the combatants ; as also this inci- 
dent at the mill-flume, — could the same thoughtful pen have failed to 
mention so considerable an achievement in the interests of the infant 
colony as the construction of a stone dam across the Charles, had it 
occurred contemporaneously with these other events? Impossible. What 
follows ? This : The dam was here when Winthrop came. 

But before Winthrop came, Roger Clapp had learned of the Indians 
at net-fishing in the shallows at the head of tide-water, the fish being 
massed there, because they could get no farther on their way to spawning- 
ground. When Winthrop first saw the dam it had become a familiar 
fact. It had been found already built, and concealed under the fall of 
fresh waters. 

The earliest map of the site of Watertown, to which I have referred, 
has on it the canal on which the flouring-mill was erected; and it is 
recorded that the colonists found the natural canal, or raceway, when 
they came. What again follows ? This : The dam ivas the work of a 
people who had come and gone before the earliest JSnglish settlement on 
our shores. 

Look at the testimony of the weir. The structure consists of a low 
stone-wall spanning the river, shaped like the letter V, with the angle 
down stream, and a trap at the point. The weir is submerged at flood- 
tide. With the flood come schools of fish seeking spawning-ground and 
fresh water. In the absence of a dam there would have been nothing 
to arrest their progress, and they would not have stopped at Watertown 
any more than at any other point below or above. With a dam the fish 
would mass below, and with the ebb-tide seek escape at the angle of 
the weir. The fact that they were taken in great numbers at the pres- 










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DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 35 

ent Watertown by a weir is absolute proof of the existence of the dam 
Wood says one hundred thousand were taken in two tides, — that is, in a 
single day. The Indians had taught the settlers that the fish could be 
used for manuring their corn, and the poor crop of 1631 had made them 
feel the necessity of a fertilizer. 

In the spring of 1632, authorized by Winthrop, the weir was set up. 
The order presupposes the existence of the dam; without it the weir 
would have had nothing to catch. 

The dam must have been already built before 1631. It could not 
have been built by the handful of Saltonstall's half-invalid men between 
the autumn of 1631 and the spring of 1632. Why ? Because it was built 
of rounded bowlders gathered from the fields, not from quarries ; and 
that involved too much time and labor. How do we know it was 
built of field stone, — rounded bowlders ? In this way. Not many years 
ago the foundations of portions of the dam were undermined, and the 
water broke through and left the structure bare to its base, open to 
any eye. 

Let us look at the Records of the General Court. 

Wood returned to England in August, 1633. He records, in his " New 
England's Prospect," that there was " a water milne on Stony Brook 
(Boxberry) " and another in Saugus. The mill at Watertown is under- 
stood to have preceded all others. If this be so, it must have been 
set up, at the latest, early in 1633. It was a work of private enterprise, 
since subsequent action of the General Court decided that it belonged 
to Mr. Dudley and not to Mr. Howe. At a town-meeting of Watertown 
Jan. 3, 1634-5, it was " voted that four rods wide on each side of the 
river should be laid apart to the use of the ware, so that it may not 
be prejudicial to the mill." The necessity of defining the rights or wants 
of the weir had been revealed by experience in the years immediately 
preceding. 

As Winthrop was complained against by Dudley for personally authorizing 
(the General Court not being in session) the construction of the weir in the 



36 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

winter and spring of 1631-32, it is clear the dam must have been previously 
built. 

The Records of the Court are preserved. They contain its action at the 
session, July 5, 1631, authorizing a levy on the public for the opening 
of the canal along Blackstone Street from the cove at the present Haymarket 
Square through to the water at the east, and another levy, at the session 
Feb. 3, 1631-2, for making the palisade about Newtown (now Cambridge). 

Now, is it not clear that a large work on Charles River, like the building 
of a stone-dam, involving the labor for a long time of a large number of 
able-bodied men, could not have been undertaken without discussion ? As a 
private matter, it could not have been done without capital and the co- 
operation of laborers; as a public matter, it could not have been under- 
taken without the authority of the General Court ; but of this there is 
no record. Contemporary or subsequent history does not mention it. 

Finally, it would have been much cheaper to have built a mill on Clematis 
Brook, with abundant fall, and without a costly dam. 

The meaning of all this is that the dam was where it now is when Win- 
throp came. 

Why do I speak so confidently ? Fortunate leisure has enabled me 
to go far enough in certain directions of study and exploration to see 
what must he as a matter of scientific deduction. When that point, the 
what must he, is reached, prediction is natural, unavoidable, and safe. 
As I prophesied from the literature of geography the finding of Fort 
Norumbega at the junction of Stony Brook with the Charles, and went 
to the spot and found it; and as I deduced the site of the remains of 
Leifs houses in Vinland from the necessities which the strict construction 
of the Sagas required, and went to the spot where I had indicated that 
the remains had once been, and found them there more than a year 
after the prediction was announced, — so I have arrived by inevitable 
deduction at the seat and centre of the early colony of Northmen in 
America. 

I do not deduce the maser industry from the presence of the dam at 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 37 

Watertown, but I deduce the dam and seaport and docks and wharves as 
essential to the maser industry revealed in the Sagas. 

I may not take your time to tell of my interviews with many of the best- 
informed and elderly men of "Watertown, — with ladies who as little girls 
had gathered wild violets and anemones on what, with the exception of 
the trees, were the otherwise unoccupied islands below the dam, then as 
now walled about with substantial masonry without mortar ; or of my 
delight in finding the walled channels between these islands, — at least 
four in number, — the docks ; or the Hack meadow muck under the gravelly 
earth that constitutes the body of the walled islands ; 1 or the parallel cyclo- 
pean walls extending on both sides of the river along the narrows and 
shallows to which Clapp came in 1630. These walls, extending to the 
opening meadows toward the Arsenal, by narrowing the channel increased 
the depth of the water at high-tide, and so made it practicable to float 
the blocks across the river from the boom-dams on the right bank below 
to the docks and wharves, as well as with greater ease and certainty to 
lead ships to and from the docks ; or the long basin for the reception of 
blocks and their accumulation, which also serves as a fish- way 2 into the 
basin from the north; or the great artificial basin (Cook's Pond), the pro- 
duct of the boom-dam, on the opposite side of the river, — all of which, 
and much more that might be named, belong to the period of seven to 
nine centuries ago : the work of the Northmen. 

All these are remains of the ancient seaport of Norumbega. This was the 
site, pictured on so many ancient maps, at the head of tide-water, on the 
"River that flowed through a Lake to the Sea," — the Hop of Thorfinn, salt at 
flood-tide and fresh at ebb, — the ancient Boston Back Bay. The islands were 
wharves. The channels between them, closed or nearly closed at the upper 

1 This was alluvial soil, once the surface, submerged at extreme high-tide below the falls, and 
deposited in the eddy of the flood-tide and current of the Charles before the dam was built. The 
proprietor of the foundry on the spot informed me that he had occasion to find substantial foundation 
to support parts of the foundry. He dug down through the gravel till he came to black meadow muck, 
and through that to solid bottom. 

2 There is a fine display of boom-dams and fish-ways on Vine Brook, between the Arlington 
Reservoir and the Mystic. See town map. 



40 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

Among the considerations that led to the erection of the Tower, besides 
those already mentioned, were these : — 

1. It will commemorate the Discovery of Vinland and Nokumbega 
in the forty-third degree, and the identification of Norumbega with Norway, 
the home country to which this region was once subject by right of dis- 
covery and colonization. 

2. It will invite criticism, and so sift out any errors of interpre- 
tation into which, sharing the usual fortune of the pioneer, I may have 
been led. 

3. It will encourage archaeological investigation in a fascinating and 
almost untrodden field, and be certain to contribute in the results of 
research and exploration, both in the study and the field, to the histori- 
cal treasure of the Commonwealth. 

4. It will help, by reason of its mere presence, and by virtue of the 
veneration with which the Tower will in time come to be regarded, to 
bring acquiescence in the fruit of investigation, and so allay the blind 
scepticism, amounting practically to inverted ambition, that would deprive 
Massachusetts of the glory of holding the Landfall of Leif Erikson, and 
at the same time the seat of the earliest colony of Europeans in America. 

If time would permit, I might tell you further of the maser industry ; 
of the fisheries and furs and agriculture ; of the amusements, and the 
republican form of government inherited with the Norse blood ; of the social 
relations of the Indians with the Northmen, and the splendid men found 
by Thevet and Verrazano, and later by the Pilgrims and Puritans, in such 
samples of chieftains as Massasoit and Uncas and King Philip. I might 
point out the course of the Northmen, moving northeastward after the 
maser blocks of the valley of the Charles had been exhausted; the 
traces of their stay on the Penobscot, and their progress through the State 
of Maine and Nova Scotia to Cape Breton ; the principal causes of the 
decline of Greenland ; the final departure of the last ship in the maser 
trade from Markland (Cape Breton), and its arrival in 1347 in Iceland. 



DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 41 

I might hint at the lines of research specially connected with traces 
of the language of the Northmen, such as the fact recorded by Roger 
Williams that the title " sachem " or " sagamore " of the Indians has the 
same root as sak, the Icelandic word for " king." All this, however, I 
must, in the main, leave to others, who will enter, with new enthusiasm 
and more time before them, into this fresh field in archaeological and 
geographical research. 

It has been suggested that the trustworthiness of my conclusions might 
be tested by the spade, — that bronze and pottery should be sought for. 

Articles of such materials were not improbably to some extent in use 
in Vinland and Norumbega. Remnants of much corroded bronze have been 
found by Nordenskjold in Greenland, from which place the early Northmen 
came. Porous pottery would, perhaps, be less likely to survive in such a 
climate ; 1 it has, however, been found in ancient Norway. But of imple- 
ments which we know from the Sagas were in use here by the Northmen, 
we have found specimens. Thorwald's men subsisted through their first 
winter on the salmon of the Charles. Here is a stone sinker found near 
the site of Thorwald's dwelling-house. I have seen and photographed 
several others found along the banks of the Charles. Similar to these 
were the sinkers used by the Indians. 

Here is an Indian arrow-point picked up on the field of the battle 
between Thorfinn and the Skrselings, in which a man of distinction, 
Snorri Thorbrandson, fell. His body was found, so the Sagas say, with a 
sharp stone sticking in his head. If the " sharp stone " may not have been 
a flint arrow-point, but a stone tomahawk, here is a sharp stone that 
may bear that name, which was found on the same battlefield. 

A great stone mortar, such as Northmen used in very early times to 
grind their grain in Norway, was found, as already mentioned, near the 
site of the Tower, and is now set in the wall near its base. 

Copper and brass, in the form of implements of war or articles of 

1 Glazed pottery, Du Chaillu says, was unknown in the north. Montelius says the same. 



42 DISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF NORUMBEGA. 

decoration, have been found in graves within the territory of Norumbega. 
In the grave of Uncas, in Norwich, Conn., a very ancient maser-bowl, long 
used, was found, and is now preserved in the Slater Museum. 

I have seen stone tablets, bearing inscriptions apparently of great his- 
toric interest, some of which may have been wrought by men of Norse 
descent. Mr. Ober, of Beverly, has had them photographed. 

Such articles, as well as bronze and pottery, possibly await the student. 

My own search, however, has been less detailed. I have looked for 
the evidences and seats of certain industries pursued through long periods 
of time and on a large scale by Northmen ; I have looked for the site 
and memorials of an historic city, built, long occupied as a seaport, and 
abandoned many centuries ago ; I have sought the birthplace of the earliest 
European colony on our shores, and something of its course as a people ; 
and I have to-day sketched the results of my labors. 






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VINLAND. 

By E. H. CLEMENT. 



MIST AND FLOTSAM. 



A. D. 1000. 



Earth endures; 

Stars abide — 

Shine down in the old sea : 

Old are the shores ; 

But where are old men? 

I who have seen much 

Such have I never seen. 

Here is the land 
Shaggy with wood 
With its old valley, 
Mound, and flood, 
But the heritors? 
Fled like the flood's foam, 
The lawyer and the laws 
And the kingdom 
Clean swept herefrom. 

Emerson, Earth-Song. 

For Fancy's gift 
Can mountains lift : 
The Muse can knit 
What is past, what is done 
With the web that 's just begun. 
Emerson, The Poet. 

Soundeth the prophetic wind, 

The shadows shake on the rock behind, 

And the countless leaves of the pine are 

strings 
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings. 



Hearken ! hearken ! 
If thou wouldst know the mystic song 
Chanted when the sphere was young. 
Aloft, abroad, the psean swells ; 
wise man, hear'st thou half it tells? 
O wise man, hear'st thou the least part ? 

'T is the chronicle of art. 
To the open ear it sings 
Sweet the genesis of things. 

Emerson, Woodnotes. 

My spirit bows in gratitude 

Before the Giver of all good, 

Who fashioned so the human mind 

That, from the waste of Time behind, 

A simple stone, or mound of earth, 

Can summon the departed forth ; 

Quicken the Past to life again, 

The Present lose in what hath been, 

And in their primal freshness show 

The buried forms of long ago. 

As if a portion of that Thought 

By which the Eternal Will is wrought, 

Whose impulse fills anew with breath 

The frozen solitude of Death, 

To mortal minds were sometimes lent, 

To mortal musings sometimes sent, 

To whisper — even when it seems 

But Memory's fantasy of dreams — 

Through the mind's waste of woe and sin, 

Of an immortal origin! 

Whittier, The Norsemen. 



MARE OCEANUM. 

When Earth's form and void begun 

Underneath the ancient Sun, 

Poured round all the flowing Ocean 

First obeying Law in motion. 

First of things terrestrial 

Acknowledging celestial ; 

Free still of all governance 

Save eternal ordinance. 

Universal potency 

Lurks in all-embracing sea, 

All- watering stream, all-nourishing, 

From seeding unto flourishing; 

Pervading earth in myriad form, 

Now glacier, now summer storm, — 

Visiting thus but to return 

Every drop to Ocean's urn ; 

All-bearing on its broad highway 

From yonder cape to far Cathay; 

Ever the same to all men free, 

Whoe'er on land may master be, — 

One law deduces history thence : 

Things continue as commence. 

When the first savage launched his tree, 

Bestriding it in southern sea, 

Then hollowed it, then shaped an oar, 

He linked the whole world shore to shore. 

So bid we vikings' history 



46 

Surrender us our mystery. 

Roman legions' solid walls 

Tell Britons still when they were thralls; 

But our unfathomable wave 

Was ne'er to old Rome's arms made slave 

Yet Christian Rome's new influence 

Is wider traced by finer sense ; 

Surpassing war, a mission's zeal 

Red Eric tamed and laid Leif s keel, 

So the Sea's worshipper devout 

Will ever draw new wealth thereout. 

Or noon or night, or fair or foul, 

Patient as fasting monk in cowl, 

He cons Earth's opening page here spread, 

A blank still, or, if writ, unread 

Save by the subtle divination 

Of Science's imagination. 



ODYSSEYS. 

Man here faced eternity, — 
Poring on the mystery, 
Ever venturing in its brink, 
Better learning not to sink, 
Still its wide, gray pastures grazing, 
Still beyond and farther gazing. 
The eldest heroes of the world 
Plied the oar and sails unfurled, 
The eldest poet sang the Sea: 
Make us another Odyssey! 
Tell us more, and always more ; 
How they added shore to shore, 
Out from Posts of Hercules 



47 

Toward the far Hesperides ; 
How Atlantis e'en they scanned, 
Or believed they traced its strand, 
Looming in enchanted mist; 
How, of sudden, sails were kissed 
By scented breeze from Happy Isles 
Whose fable seamen still beguiles. 
What an epos, from Phoenicians 
Down to merchanting Venetians ! 
Argive galleys, prows of Rome, 
Beaching e'en on our old home. 
Tell how Rome's puissant rule 
Reaches to the farthest Thule, 
And from Iona's cloistered halls 
Christ's spell northmost lands enthralls, 
And Iceland, warming in its gleam, 
Blossoms in church and academe; 
Until, surpassing all the earth 
In learning and in moral worth, 
F'orth sends, in first millennial year, 
Princes and bishops even here ! 



WUNDERSTRAND. 

Tell not us that all is writ 

Of Ocean's lore, — not us who sit 

From birth in sight of Ocean's wonder, 

And dream what therein is or under. 

Many a record writ in water, 

Making history-books the shorter, 

Reappears to him who heeds 

The truth that every law must needs 

Bear but one fruitage, near or far, 



48 



This age or that, on any star. 

So clear-eyed Science, sage, sedate, 

Bidden by Fancy all elate, 

Constructs the ships the dreamer dreams, 

Figuring the very ribs and seams, 

And, led by poet's ecstasies, 

More and more of truth still sees. 

Shore-dwellers never quit their stand 

Of watch upon the wonderstrand, 

Noting the moods of the changing sea 

For what new teaching thence may be. 

E'en seaweed thrilling message bore, 

"In the sun and the wind and the wild uproar,' 

To him who sang how Boston Bay 

Takes Boston in her arms each day. 

The child the salt waves reared beside, 

Whose playfellow is the rising tide, 

And tiny, monster-peopled pool, 

Among the rocks, his earliest school, — 

No chapter of a sea romaunt 

His fervent faith may ever daunt. 

The time-worn wreck's ribs in the sand 

For chapel of devotions stand. 

He knows the wild-flowers of the deep, 

The harvests strange that fishers reap, 

Eels Portuguese, and squids, and whales. 

He lists old seamen tell their tales ; 

He sees one morn from shining sea 

A fin revolved all silently, 

Marking Behemoth's bulk beneath, 

Or sea-dog's eye in green wave's wreath. 

He sees the ebb bare Ocean's bed, 

And flood the broad seas inland spread; 

Shudders at storm-rote in the night, 

And finds the broken ship at light. 



49 

He knows how homing sail round up 

From underworld, — first the maintop, 

And then the mizzen, and then the hull, 

As up the long swell rides the gull. 

He once beholds in a mirage 

Brigs bottom up and strangely large 

Stand in the sky athwart Broad Sound, — 

A sworn sea-serpent's sauntering ground, — 

And harks the nixeys ring the bell 

Whose dolors mark the east wind's swell. 

His childhood's awe is ne'er forgot 

Of maelstrom in steep Shirley Gut, 

Nor seasoned yet the child's surprise 

Who saw before his infant eyes 

Side-wheeled Cunarder overwhelm 

With British smoke the wine-glass elm 

Of Apple Island. Small things ? True : 

Small thing for wonder is it, too, 

That ships that fared to Greenland's shore 

Should southward fare a little more: 

Gloucester now fishes Iceland seas, 

Iceland then came to Penikese. 

Light then as now did shallop run 

O'er morning sea in jocund sun, 

Hands stout as now when night winds rave 

The rudder grasped and cut the wave, 

Sweet then as now the smooth bay's reach, 

And soft to keel the sandy beach. 

A marvel greater far it were 

If ne'er a bold adventurer, 

To make the farthest voyage his boast, 

Had wandered on from coast to coast. 

Would such his lengthening leagues have reckoned 

So long as Blue Hill onward beckoned? 



50 



VINLAND RUNE. 

SrNG we, then, a rugged rune, 

In Emerson's and Whittier's tune, — 

Verse for honest-spoken folk, 

Compact of stuff as egg of yolk, 

Simple, blunt, but yet not coarse ; 

Native, and still something Norse, 

As is meet for kindred race 

Dwelling in the very place 

Where the Norsemen moored their ships 

And left their names on savage lips. 

Italian Colon Iceland sought, 

And tales the bardic sagas taught 

Of ancient trips to Western seas 

Were treasured by the Genoese. 

Americus's traitorous tale 

Too long is suffered to prevail: 

Christopher was not alone 

Victim for a time outshone, 

Where that crafty story spread. 

Other voyages now are read, 

Other learning now avails, 

With North and South in balanced scales. 

Not for all wear are silk and satin ; 

Not all was writ in Greek and Latin ; 

Tongues in rich diversity 

Make modern university 

Open arms to newest lore, 

Thin conceits of old give o'er, 

Barbarous birth our language owns, 

Gothic pith is in our bones ; 

Heart of heart in kinship warms, 



51 

With levelling Vandals' peopling swarms, 

Sturdiest stocks of old Caucasian, — 

Liberty, self-rule, their passion, 

Ever the same from earliest hour 

To Alfred, King, and our own Mayflower. 

From folk-mote to the Commonwealth 

Is one straight march, naught won by stealth, 

But bold in name of law and right, 

Of people's need and people's might. 

Kingcraft nor priestcraft frames decree 

For them who dare the unpassed Sea. 



IDYLS. 

A "WONDROUS task waits him who sings 

The idyls of our uncrowned kings. 

But who begins must sail with Leif, 

Earl Eric's son, and that oft wife, 

Fair Gudrid, and wise Karlsefne, 

And all the sagas' company, — 

Peering, like pilot, through their lore, 

The mist and flotsam of our shore, 

Wafted from that hurricane 

Of Danish vikings from the main 

That brought Canute to Britain's coast, — 

Spawn of her ocean-ruling host, — 

And reached our capes with circlings spent 

Ere Harold's dynasty was rent. 

'Mid these dark waves of history 

Comes drift galore with poesy. 



Gudrid, the wife of three, the sage and sweet, 
Gudrid, the mother of that Vinland babe 



52 

Whose coming made the first home on our shores, 

Mother of Greenland bishops, and herself 

In saintly age welcomed as nun at Rome, — 

Of all sweet women of the idyl's world 

None than our Gudrid is more debonair. 

What time brave Leif the title "Lucky" won, 

Because it was his lot to save a score 

Of shipwrecked voyagers huddled on a rock 

In midmost ocean, Gudrid then appears. 

First Thorer's bride, still but a fair-haired girl, 

True floweret of the sea, lissome and strong, 

Sharing her viking's joys and strifes and toils. 

Leif's foster-sister thence, and cherished well: 

Her husband dead, when suitors came to woo 

Leif s word decided for her, and by him 

Was given her hand to Thorstein Ericsson. 

Penelope was not more chaste and wise : 

When Thorstein Black folds her within his arms, 

Beside her second husband's dying bed, 

She gently puts him by, returns to Leif, 

And understanding well (so sing the bards), 

How to conduct herself, with due delay 

Weds opulent Karlsefne, merchant bold, 

And with him fares to Vinland. Here one day, 

As Gudrid sat beside her cradled babe, 

(The baby Snorre, named Karlsefnesson, 

Grandsire of Ingveld, mother of Bishop Brand,) 

A shadow filled the doorway, and there stood 

An Indian woman, but pale and wild of eye, 

(Such eyes, the saga saith, that none so large 

Were ever seen in human face before,) 

With yellow hair, like to the Northmen's locks, 

A kirtle black and snood, and yearning said, 

"What art thou called?" "Gudrid," the wife replied, 

And bade her welcome. " And what art thou called ? ' 



53 

" Gudrid," the savage answered, but just then 

Great din of battle rose without the door, 

A Skraelling fell slain by Karlsefne's band, 

And fled the great-eyed squaw with yellow hair. 

So evermore this apparition haunts 

The Iceland sagas ; and when tales went round 

Of Greenland ships that never had returned, 

The fair-haired Skraelling stirred some dread surmise 

Of Northmen living lost on that far coast, 

With Skraelling daughters called by old home names, 

And blond, with yellow hair and wide blue eyes. 

So Gudrid passes, graceful, gracious form, 
Amid salt bands of bearded mariners, 
Bearing to Rome their grail of massur wood, 
The veinings carven in a woven rede, 
With Iceland's falcon as a dove of peace. 



See, for her foil, Freydis, the sister strange 

Of gentle Leif, manlike as Macbeth's wife, 

Daughter of Eric, the red-handed Earl, 

Heading the voyage of Helge and Finborg, 

Plotting against them with outnumbering band, 

And when her stronger will and craft had won 

Advantage over them and discord reigned, 

Slew them at night, and since no man of hers 

Would slay their women, " Give me the axe ! " she cried, 

Nor stayed her arm till all lay in their blood ; 

Then stormed upbraiding to her husband's bed. 

But bribed her band to secrecy at home 

Of all the sorry work on Vinland shore. 



Thoehall, the Hunter, what a figure he 
For tale of heroes ! Burly, taciturn, 
Sarcastic, sceptic 'gainst the new-won faith, 



54 

Thor vaunting over Christ, and breaking off 
From his companions to scour strange wilds alone. 
The Melancholy Jacques's prototype ! 
Him the fleet-footed Scot slaves sent to save 
Found lying on a hill-top muttering verse, 
Breathing the whiles in frenzy strange and loud, 
Possessed by spirit of the Norseland seer. 

And what a Lancelot these sagas sing ! 

Biorn Asbrandson, wooer of Tiiurid, the wife 

Of Thorodd, whom the Orkneys' Earl, Sigurd, 

Owed for the rescue of his tithing-men. 

An idyl all his own this Biorn claims! 

None but great Meister of the Nibelung's Lied 

Its towering passions could in art unfold, — 

Drama of wonders, valkyrs, chivalry, 

Of combats, banishment, and dauntless plans 

Of guilty heroism. Tannhauser-like, 

The erring knight to tears of shame is brought 

By Thurid's brother, the priest of Helgafell, 

And so flies in self-exile far to the south ; 

And after many years, when Iceland men, 

Wrecked beyond Vinland, faced a warlike host, 

As sachem (so too Northmen called their king) 

Under its banner rode an aged knight, 

Tall, straight, white-bearded, and in Northern speech 

Addressed them, and so, learning whence they came, 

Plied them with questioning of things at home, 

Bade them make sail and flee while yet they might ; 

But ere they were gone whispered to Gudleif low, 

" This sword to Kiarten, hero of Froda, take, 

And to his mother Thurid give this ring ! " 

And so is left this knightly figure here, 

Forerunner, haply, of great sagamores, 

Friendly Canonicus and Massasoit! 



55 



ENVOY. 

Build, O, build in loftier line 
Than this prosing verse of mine, 
Poets of our native land, 
An epic of our wonders trand, 
Worthy of the heroes' grace 
Who first revealed it to the race. 
Lo ! our own heroic age ! 
'Tis our classic heritage, 
Linking us by line direct 
To demigods too little recked 
Since the conquering Latin host 
Set up their gods for those we lost. 
Christian sweetness, Gothic right, 
Married in one shining light, 
Breaking mediaeval night, 
Lit on Europe's northern shore 
Beacons to burn forevermore. 
When old St. Botolph's tower was new, 
For boat-help builded as was due 
That seaman saint of North Sea's shore, 
Men still told Gudrid's story o'er, 
Her pilgrimage, her wise, brave ways, 
Coupling her works with his in praise. 
This tower to her folk we rear, 
A beacon to Discovery, — 
Since ever truth shall make us free, — 
That our free thought may wax the freer, 
That we may welcome aye the new, 
Patient to try if it be the true, 
Nor say there is no more to hear. 
L.oFC. 



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